Although research shows that Nepalese parents prefer sending girls to schools with female teachers, only 12.8 percent of Nepalese primary school teachers are women. Nepal has among the lowest enrollment and retention rates for girls in the world. One strategy to correct the situation is to...

In many developing countries, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 will require significant increases in expenditures on social services and in foreign assistance. It will also require careful planning of the sector allocation and sequencing of public spending. Especially...

The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), signed into American law on May 18, 2000, is a major plank of U.S. initiatives toward the African continent. The Act aims broadly at improving economic policymaking in Africa, enabling countries to embrace globalization, and securing durable...

This paper analyzes the economic growth impact of organized political violence. First, the authors articulate the theoretical underpinnings of the growth impact of political violence in a popular model of growth under uncertainty. The authors show that, under plausible assumptions regarding...

This paper studies the relationship between the growth of China and India in world merchandise trade and Latin American and Caribbean commercial flows from two perspectives. First, the authors focus on the opportunity that China and India's markets have offered Latin American and Caribbean...

Exchange rate policy is usually driven by two different, often conflicting, objectives: to support a competitive real exchange rate and to serve as a nominal anchor for low inflation. The author focuses on whether exchange rate policy can affect the real exchange rate in the longer run, and...

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the growing use of derivatives by Danish pension institutions as a risk management tool to hedge embedded options on their balance sheets. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was a widespread practice for Danish pension institutions to guarantee a...

Processing and collection costs of loans made to small farmers are high relative to the amount lent. Lending groups and credit cooperatives have been ascribed the potential to reach small farmers with affordable credit because the processing of one large loan rather than numerous small loans may...

Since the 1970s, commodity prices have fallen in international markets at the same time that consumer pries have risen. The price of coffee declined 18 percent on world markets between 1975 and 1993, for example, but the consumer price for it increased 240 percent in the United States....

Value-added tax (VAT) has become a major tax instrument in over 50 countries and an important element in tax policy advice to developing countries. But few studies have empirically tested some basic hypotheses about the performance and key feature of VAT as a revenue-raising instrument. The...